Chapter 14 Samira
Samira
“I know you can’t respond,” Tone whispered.
Her voice moved through the room the way everything about her did—slow, deliberate, careful not to startle me. “But if you need to talk about anything, I can get you a pad. Or an iPad, if that’s easier.”
I heard the spoon tap against the rim of the bowl before she lifted it.
“I’m here, Samira.”
Her voice stayed steady, threaded gently through the small rhythm of the moment.
Lift the spoon. Pause. Wait.
The faint smell of chicken broth drifted upward as she guided the spoon toward me.
“Open a little,” she murmured.
I obeyed because I had to.
The soup was warm. Salty. Real food after hours of nothing but shock and the metallic taste of fear sitting at the back of my throat.
I swallowed.
Tone didn’t rush me. She waited until she heard it before lifting another spoonful.
“Good.”
If nothing else, I was mortified. The humiliation of it sat in my chest like something sour. This was what I had been reduced to. A grown woman who couldn’t feed herself. Someone else guiding the spoon to my mouth. Someone else deciding when I had eaten enough. Someone else watching me breathe.
Someone else being my hands. My eyes. My voice.
I swallowed again when she told me to. Because I had no other option.
The loss pressed in on me from all sides until breathing felt tight.
My control. My dignity. The small scraps of independence I had clawed together over the past year.
Gone.
Handed over to strangers because I no longer had the ability to do anything without them.
I sat there with the warmth of the soup sliding down my throat and wondered if this was the shape of the rest of my life.
Waiting. Being guided. Fed. Having my choices taken again and again until there was nothing left of me that belonged to me.
I tilted my head toward where Tone’s voice was coming from. I looked—without seeing.
The darkness behind my eyes remained solid and endless. I stared into it anyway. I wondered what she looked like.
Her voice was warm. Calm. Confident in a way that suggested someone who had spent years learning how to save others. I tried to imagine the face that matched it.
Kind eyes. Steady hands. Someone older than me, maybe. Or maybe younger.
It was strange, not being able to place a face with a voice. Strange how the mind tried to fill in the gaps when the body couldn’t.
Whatever expression crossed my face must have expressed more than I intended.
Tone clicked her tongue softly. Not annoyed. Decisive.
“I’ll get Marcello to bring an iPad.”
Her tone made it clear the decision had already been made.
She didn’t wait for me to nod. She simply continued feeding me.
Another spoonful. Another small pause. Another swallow.
And I sat there with the taste of soup and shame in my mouth, wondering how long a person could survive on the kindness of people they were completely dependent on.
“Are you sure there’s no one I can call for you?”
Her voice softened again when she asked it. This wasn’t the first time. She had asked before. Hesitantly. Like she was trying to solve a problem that didn’t make sense to her.
The idea that someone could exist without an anchor. No emergency contact. No family. No friend. No name she could write down in case something happened. No one who would notice if I vanished suddenly from the world.
I shook my head. Slow. Definitive. The movement felt heavier each time I made it.
Silence stretched between us.
Tone didn’t argue. But I could hear something shift in her breathing. Concern. Discomfort. Maybe even a little anger at a world that had allowed someone to exist without a safety net.
She told me to take another spoonful.
I raised my hand. Palm out. A small, wordless stop. I was done.
The motion was clumsy. My coordination still felt wrong, like my body had forgotten how to move without sight guiding it. But she understood.
The spoon paused. I cocked my head, listening for sound.
I heard the plate touch the table. Ceramic against wood. A soft clatter that sounded louder than it should have. I wondered if that noise carried frustration. Or maybe just resignation.
It was strange—the things that sharpened when everything else was taken away. Sound became invasive. Intimate.
I could hear the faint shift of fabric when Tone leaned back in her chair.
The low scrape of wood when the chair legs adjusted on the floor.
The slow rhythm of her breathing.
The tiny click of her fingernail against the side of the bowl as she set the spoon down.
Things I would have never noticed before. Now they were impossible to ignore. Every noise felt closer. More detailed. As if the world had narrowed itself down to a handful of small sounds.
I could hear the refrigerator humming somewhere in the background.
The faint movement of air through the vents.
The way Tone shifted her weight slightly when she stood.
Without sight. Without a voice. The world reduced itself to noise. And waiting.
Waiting for someone to speak. Waiting for someone to guide me. Waiting for someone to decide what happened next.
I sat there with my hands resting uselessly in my lap, and realized something that hollowed me out more than the darkness ever could.
I was still alive.
I knew Marcello had come back into the room before I heard his voice. His footsteps gave him away.
That was something I had learned early in life—how to identify people without needing to see them. The weight of their steps. The rhythm of their breathing. The subtle shift in the air when they entered a space.
Everyone carried their own presence. Most people moved without thinking about it. Careless. Loud in ways they never noticed.
Marcello wasn’t like that.
His presence was controlled. Heavy. The kind that filled a room without effort. Even standing still, he felt… large. Like the space around him bent slightly to accommodate him.
Tone was different. Lighter. Steadier. Her movements had a softness to them. Deliberate, but not dominating. Even blind, I could feel the difference between them.
Tone shifted beside me when he entered.
I heard the soft scrape of her chair.
“Hey,” she prompted in a low voice.
Marcello answered, but the words were too low for me to catch clearly. Their voices blended into a muted exchange—something brief, practical. The kind of conversation people had when they didn’t want to disturb someone fragile.
Then I felt something placed tenderly into my hands. It was solid. Rectangular. Cool metal along the edges. My fingers explored it instinctively, sliding over the smooth surface.
“It’s an iPad,” Tone explained. “Marcello’s already set it up for you.”
Her hand settled over mine, guiding without forcing.
“Tap here,” she murmured.
My fingertip touched the glass.
“Good. Now swipe.”
She showed me slowly, patiently, letting my hands repeat the movement until I understood the rhythm of it.
The keyboard appeared beneath my fingers when she activated it.
I ran my hands across it briefly. Useless. Without sight, the tiny buttons meant nothing.
Tone seemed to understand that before I even had to react.
“Wait.”
Something shifted in her hands.
A moment later, she placed a pen between my fingers. A stylus.
My grip tightened around it instinctively.
The screen beneath my hand felt different now. Open. Possible.
My hands hovered uncertainly above the glass.
For the first time since I got here, I had a way to speak again. And I realized I had no idea what to say.
Tone’s breath left her slowly. A breathless exhale.
Like she had been holding it in for hours—waiting for this moment, waiting for me to decide whether I would let the silence continue or break it open.
I lowered the stylus. The tip brushed the screen. My hand moved slowly. Each word careful. Deliberate.
Thank you.
Tone didn’t speak right away. When she finally did, her voice carried something soft and tired inside it.
“You don’t have to thank me, Samira.”
I wrote again. The stylus glided across the screen.
You helped me. You didn’t have to.
Her chair creaked slightly as she leaned closer.
“I did,” she returned, in a low voice. “And I will.”
There was something fragile in the way she assured me. It wasn’t pity, but something closer to heartbreak.
She shifted again.
“Where are you from?” she asked after a moment. “Are you local?”
I hesitated. The stylus hovered above the glass. The question felt simple. But answers rarely were.
I thought about how much of myself I could afford to give away.
About how dangerous honesty had been in the past. Then I thought about Tone’s voice.
About the way she asked before touching me.
About the patience in the way she fed me.
If she had wanted to hurt me, she wouldn’t have done any of those things.
Marcello, too.
He could have left me where I was. Broken. Bleeding in that alley. He didn’t.
My hand lowered again.
Tunisia.
Tone’s breath caught.
It was soft. But unmistakable.
“You’re here alone?”
Yes.
I paused before continuing.
I came to Italy a year ago. I travelled through Sicily and fell in love with Genoa. So I stayed.
The stylus lingered on the glass after the last word.
Tone paused for a moment before she asked the question that tightened something in my chest.
“And before that?” she asked. “Who did you leave behind?”
My fingers stopped moving. The air in the room shifted. It felt smaller somehow. Closer. Like the walls were leaning in to listen.
I looked down at the screen I couldn’t see. The answer rose in my throat automatically. My hand moved before I could stop it.
No-one.
The lie sat there between us. Clear. Sharp. I wondered if Tone could feel the dishonesty the way you feel a shift in temperature. If she could hear it in the way my breathing changed.
I turned my head away from her voice. Away from the direction where I knew she sat. Away from the attention in the room.
I didn’t need sight to disappear. My body had learned that trick years ago.
The silence stretched. Low. Heavy.
“Oh.”
Tone’s voice was soft. There was heartbreak in that single sound. Not pity. Recognition. She wasn’t pressing. Wasn’t forcing the answer out of me. But I could almost hear her mind assembling the pieces anyway. Fitting them together. Understanding without needing every detail.
When she spoke again, her voice was careful. Almost reverent.
“Who hurt you, Samira?”
My hands tightened around the edges of the iPad. The metal frame dug into my palms.
I didn’t answer.
The stylus remained still between my fingers.
“It’s okay,” Tone assured me. “Marcello’s gone.”
The reassurance was meant to help. But my fingers trembled anyway. It was small. Barely noticeable. But it was more than I had allowed myself in years.
My past wasn’t something you explained. It wasn’t a story people could understand over a cup of tea.
It was ugly. Cruel. Layered with things that had been buried for a reason.
Inside my mind, I had sealed it away. Boxes stacked neatly behind locked doors. Labelled. Closed. Never opened. That was how I had survived. And I wasn’t going to dig it up now.